The tubes of such a heat exchanger component must be fixed together to ensure that said heat exchanger component is sufficiently rigid and to maintain the tubes equidistant from one another and in the plane of the heat exchanger.
In order to provide these three functions, manufacturers make use, in a manner known per se, of link parts which are applied against the loops and manually welded thereto, and this is done at several levels.
The use of manual welding techniques gives rise to high manufacturing costs, to risks of cracking at the welds, and to the necessity of deforming each tube in a heat exchanger having spaced-apart tubes in order to bring the two lengths of tube adjacent to the link part closer together in order to cool said part and thus avoid oxidation thereof.
Patent document GB-A-No. 942036 describes a panel of horizontal heat exchanger tubes in a vertical plane, including an additional loop surrounding the tubes of the panel. However, the tubes of the panel are not maintained in fixed relative positions and can therefore still be subjected to deformation due to differential expansion.
The present invention seeks to provide a device for fixing together the loops in a heat exchanger component which ensures that the tubes are held relative to one another in substantially fixed relative positions, while still being cheap to manufacture.